Games That Hide The Horror in the Ordinary

there is a section in Silent Hill the short message where you are prompted to find a book from the school library and as you search you'll probably notice that a lot of these books simply say learn on the side a few say sapan Ocean View German if you've ever used a library you'll know that books of the same Ty and author tend to be in the same section they aren't scattered across bookshelves randomly at least if the library is any good but that's what we're given in this chapter of the game now

many of you who have played a game before know that when developers have to cover a ton of wall space with a lot of textures and it's not just a wall they understandably have to take shortcuts by blending stuff in and reusing assets and it really really seems like this is what a short letter is doing the book learn is almost procedurally generated to appear every few books with a slightly different color to appear random German is blue here but red here sapiens is doing a triple bunk bed thing w

ith two other copies here but that one in the middle is teal so surely we won't notice and if we were given a boss fight here and encounter with a large feathered monstrosity that is taking place in a library for some reason maybe we would notice our eyes would be on that but we're told to go find a book which kind of directs the the attention to the seams in this blanket doesn't it of course the game does highlight what the button prompt of the unique books that we are actually supposed to find

but even if it doesn't really bother you you can't just not notice this content aware copy pasting of filler book textures right but it might bother me in particular because recently I played Allen wake 2 a game that does not spare any details this is an alleyway in the game each little piece of graffiti each scrolling of the word scratch is significant to the story the movie posters refer to a character Allan has written in his books backdrops are slathered with ideography that'll become relev

ant later we go down into the subway more scrawlings about another plot Point Yet to Come nothing is wasted not even directional signs this could just be normal street indicators but at a glance it reads don't sleep again this kiosk doesn't just have generic shapes and illegible floor info it specifically serves the purpose of Haunting the player further illustrating Allen's descent into madness at some point you find this book which is a call back to remedy's 2019 game control but it's not the

book I want to show you it's this little pack of cigarettes in the background you probably missed super strong Black Pyramid brand in control there is a switch that opens this shelter door most games simply have an unlabeled button or a lever for a door maybe some out of focus text on a monitor here is what you see in control to increase room security these safe rooms are shielded with magnetite some people might experience disorientation nausea dizziness or in extreme cases heart failure when w

earing a pacemaker fun fact magnetite will actually [ __ ] up your pacemaker in quum break you can stumble upon this chalkboard that tells you not only the name of the first manuscript that Allan writes in the first game but the next two he will write in the second it also teases this symbol that appears in both control and Allen week 2 and mentions something about an awe a significant plot piece in control Quantum break came out in 2016 well before either of those games this is a plaque in Fina

l Fantasy 7 rebirth and I don't bring up these comparisons to dunk on games that don't go to this intense level of detail for simple writing on the wall rebirth has been incredible the short message was deeply moving and heartbreaking in many ways and it even has some notable in Universe graffiti of its own I make this comparison to illustrate the point that the games created by the good fins over at remedy entertainment are simply on another level when it comes to creating the devil in the deta

ils it's not just that they use the little things effectively is that they polish them to such a degree that when you look close enough not only do you not see the seams you find entire microcosms that only fertilize your fascination with this world you see the Allen weight games control Quantum break and possibly the max pain games depending on who you ask are all connected individual pieces of the remedy verse These details aren't there just for the sake of making a pretty game the little thin

gs you find are strategically to become relevant later or to recontextualize your understanding of these stories in some way whether it be carefully crafted textures the copious amounts of uncanny found footage musical sequences written by an in Universe band that are always a critical plot point with lyrics that directly Echo these subtleties of the story or the fact that there is an entire fully produced 20-minute short film that is both completely optional to find and extremely missable in Al

len wake 2 because [ __ ] it that's just how we do it here remedy games have completely blown me away with how willing they are to let these subtext do the heavy lifting you can pick one up and shoot stuff while you enjoy the trippy visuals and badass musical sequences or you can take a closer look and find yourself hopelessly lost in an ocean of interconnected Madness these games make me feel how I imagine Kingdom Hearts fans feel except you know minus the big sigh when you ask them to explain

the Lord these Journeys are exceptionally de detail oriented and that's what I want to talk to you about today and it truly does start with being extremely detail oriented because these stories in each of these games leave so much up to interpretation it begs you to lean in closer to fill in the blanks it dares you to go find a book so it has to hide it seams perfectly so that they don't take you out of the story if we go back to the short message there was a really well done sequence where the

walls are plastered with cruel marks on sticky notes and it's a powerful moment to be sure but the longer you stare at these notes the more you begin to notice how it was done you can see that every instance of the word loser is written exactly the same all caps two exclamation marks center of the square every note with crazy is torn exactly the same cutting off some of the C take your pick you'll find the same conclusion it's clear that a couple of notes were written and copy pasted to fill the

wall s but if you try to do the same thing with this hotel room in Wake 2 you won't find two sheets of paper that look exactly the same even though the written content is almost identical you get the sense that someone feverishly scribbled each and every single one of them by hand and that's because someone likely did this is Sam Lake he was the guy you saw dancing at the game awards and the creative director at remedy entertainment that board I mentioned from Quantum break he wrote it himself

in fact he's done quite a few of them in his games quite a few of Remedy game projects there there are bits and pieces in there that I have created in control there are a number of whiteboards in different uh research areas on all kinds of theories I did multiple whiteboards uh wrote them full and they were photographed and put in and this has sort of always been his style back in max pain 2 he handw wrote These crayon drawings you can find that sum up the events of the first game and it's clear

that this philosophy of using small missable elements like this has found its way into all of remedy's work the vision of Sam and the other developers doing this in my opinion can best be Illustrated in a non- remedy game The Stanley Parable one of the things that made this game such a goofy experience is how despite the narrator being your main source of instruction and story beatss when you play you can't help but feel like the game has something even more important to say through its environ

ment this sign for instance planting the idea that you could break the rules even more by jumping from the lift this PowerPoint displaying sarcastic social commentary about the workplace and following directions further echoing the game's meta narrative little touches like this though missable feel like the world itself is Whispering something to you and that's what the vision was for Alan Wake 2's dark place they hand painted so much graffiti and designed so much material that is related to Ala

n psyche because they wanted to in lead environment artist nazareno Urban's words and we want to create the feeling that the dark place is talking to Alan and the [Music] player physical and sometimes metaphysical places you visit in these games are all built like this there is a main narrative that is communicated through dialogue and a Subara lying just beneath the surface that is told in the environment itself bright Falls is where you'll spend your time in the first Allen wake and there's ju

st simply no one normal here there's a woman who is so terrified of the dark that she goes around town obsessively checking to ensure light bulbs in every re building are regularly replaced the bulbs will need changing soon you can't change them in the dark there's a waitress who is enamored with Allen and his books if you check her house she has a mural of him over her bed there are TV sets scattered throughout bright Falls that play a program called night Springs silly little skits full of dar

k humor that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot yet you can't help but watch and be haunted by their potential significance as you to continue the oldest house in control is a living breathing Paradox it shouldn't exist impossible architecture abounds a jukebox is being held under maximum security she's only just arrived and been made aware of this but Jesse is now the director the house knows this and has morphed to reflect it she is portrayed in frames around the building as director i

n a picture that she has never taken there is a room in nund with sticky notes this file says something caused a sticky note to duplicate in my office I will be working from home until this is resolved this is easily one of the strangest places in a game ever and if you remove the main story entirely it is simply fascinating on its own and you could say the same for bright Falls and either Allan Wake and the dark place and I don't think these settings would work as well as they do without a good

reason to look closely at them this Library isn't as glaring an issue if you aren't told to go find a book and in the same way without these plots being as complex and enigmatic as they are the environment would feel like a minor factor in these games instead of a major player you see these stories in remedy's work although well written are not cut and dry you get a lot of answers you get a lot of closure but your understanding of the true nature behind the supernatural forces at play is always

just Out Of Reach that's what makes these places so captivating to interact with because they are your window into everything you and the characters simply can't ever fully know there's this indie game called The Exit 8 right the premise is simple you're trapped in this sort of limbo this limal space of a subway station every time you come around this corner you're met with the same scene a hallway with a stranger walking down it you can go back but well you see the problem so to escape you hav

e to keep your senses sharp and look closely for any anomalies anything about the scene that doesn't look quite right if something is off say like this door handle being in the center of the door these posters ever so slightly growing or this man suddenly smiling for some reason you have to turn around if it's normal just keep going do this correctly and you'll progress do it correctly eight times and you can finally leave but these details are only made important because the game necessitates t

hat you find them despite how unsettling they can often be it's very Fatal Frame in that regard requiring you to stare what's frightening in the face you're forced to take a closer look at the ordinary and the more you stare the more you realize how much is staring back at you gameplay lead Marco muku points out that the style of horror remed he likes to employ is the everyday weird things that look just perfectly fine then a Twist comes and you're like okay what's going on [Music] here and I th

ink one of the most powerful ways that this is done is in that Eerie Sensation that comes from drawing connections between details this is the Ocean View Motel a place that you'll frequent a lot in control and like many other things in the oldest house you never get a full explanation of what exactly it is you pull a cord three times the motel appears you ring a bell solve a weird puzzle get a key open a door and then after three more cord poles you've moved into a new place in the oldest house

there is nothing extraordinary about the motel itself you're always just passing through it's just this place in between places Jesse describes it as the average of all the motels she stayed at on the road over the years have we been here before no I've stayed at a lot of roadside motels across the country on the road on the run under the radar this feels like all of them like something recognized from a dream now there are some peculiar things you notice like how these doors with the symbols ar

e always locked for some reason you come here several times throughout the game they still don't open they never do why include them if there is no purpose and when I first played this back in 2020 I kind of filed this away is just another weird thing the oldest house has to offer last month I'm playing awake 2 and then I hear this on the phone come to me Ocean View Hotel I left my room key for you it's right there on the pay phone this spooked me because while I knew it was a control reference

while I knew that it was likely the same place Jesse had been I also all at once realized how much I didn't know how little control had explained but this game used little details and discrepancies to play with what I thought I understood that was a motel this was a hotel this was Grand on the outside not some cheap place to stay off the highway again the dark place teased me the address was three cord street because of course it was just another subtle way to contrast how close I felt like I wa

s to understanding what the ocean view was with how hopelessly far I truly was to fully grasping this Cosmic anomaly being here created a sensation in me that I can only imagine Allan felt an uncanny familiarity the same one that Jesse had felt as a man of his Fame this was likely the average of every Hotel he had stayed at over the years promoting his novels this place was somehow everywhere Allen had been and yet somewhere he had never been it was a place I had become familiar with and yet was

somehow completely foreign there were enough Eerie similarities to make me feel like I had been here before like these same locked doors that serve no purpose in this game as as well yet still so strange and alien that I never felt at ease it's for this reason that the ocean view is probably my new favorite location in a game because it's a beautiful moment of Luda narative Harmony where I felt exactly how I imagined the main character is feeling and I realize that this sort of only works if yo

u play control first and have a preconception of the Ocean View Motel but remedy does this sort of thing on an individual game basis as well there's this room you enter in the hotel tell as Allen that does something hotel rooms don't usually do you don't really have any context for this vision and it doesn't seem to be related to anything currently going on a radio cuts on and this song is playing the signal is bad you can't really make out the chorus but it weaves a piece of itself into your su

bconscious neither of these things mean anything now but later on in the story they certainly will you finally find this place as detective Saga Anderson and you faintly recognize it you hear that song properly and swear you've heard it in a dream before the overlap is at the [Music] point of course this example assumes you play the game in a certain order for most of the game you can swap back and forth between Saga and Allen at your leisure so maybe you've seen is first but it goes both ways l

ittle subtleties in both routes Echo into the other to make your encounters with the supernatural feel exactly that by far my favorite moment in the first Allan Wake is this part at the Anderson house the place belongs to these old guys from the diner at the beginning the Anderson Brothers T and Odin formerly members of the 70s band the old gods of Asgard you find them again when you are later touring this special needs facility we're told they have dementia and they are squabbling nonsense betw

een themselves while playing this board game Tor is waving around a squeaky Hammer it's both adorable and a bit sad but moments later Odin pulls Allen to the side and insists that he go to their Farm because he'll find answers there not exactly reassuring coming from these two but sure enough you go and after flipping the breaker in their house you hear this record skipping [Music] downstairs of course we need to find where it's coming from that's the message the Anderson's talked about that's t

he whole reason we're here Lady of the light oh that's got to be what's your face the crazy lamp lady from the town the lady of the light is of course the old bat from the beginning that was checking the light bulbs and she is who you'll have to go find next and it's hard for me to fully put into words why this was so damn cool to me you know it would have been really easy for Odin to just tell Allan to go find Cynthia Weaver it would have been really easy for most games to toss some dialogue at

you and then put a destination on your map but the fact that you find out the next step in this Bizarre Adventure somehow through the lyrics of a song that was written years and years ago just makes this all feel so Grand so frighteningly serendipitous and the song itself if you ever listen to the full thing is actually incredible it's a tremendous song and fittingly it's not the only fully produced old God song that directly interacts with the plot I won't spoil the ashtray maze in control or

the dark ocean summoning from WG 2 but in both instances music from this band has power it bends the world to the protagonist's will much like the forces of Darkness it also has agency and it gives these haunting and terrifying stories a beautiful undertone that despite how vicious the forces of Darkness are portrayed the human spirit in the form of pure badass rock and roll is every bit as mysterious and Powerful Destiny I hope this sounds as awesome as it sounds in my head the old of Asgard ar

e a completely fictional band they are portrayed by the real world group Poets of the fall but every time they work on music for these games you'll notice that the lyrics are always directly applicable to the plot this is another of those little things that Sam lake is adamant on when they were producing alen wig 2 remedy held a songw writing camp for several artists they were trying to find songs to play at the end of every chapter of the game and much like the work they've done with Poets of t

he Fall Sam had one one rule for the artists involved the lyrics need to be about the story he even brought in poetry he had written about the characters to help Inspire Said lyrics and again this idea of every little possible element of the world tying back into the story is what gives these games a hauntingly larger than life feel like you'll never fully grasp all of the complexity behind this world like you're constantly viewing a vast gaping Universe through a peephole there's a lift you rid

e in control where AI sings something and finish in the background the song is called the heroes Tango and the lyrics translated describe the events of the first Allen wake and parallel them to Jesse's Journey that short film you can easily Miss in Wake two is called ilon E nightless night it portrays this strange collection of events that depending on how you interpret the true nature of certain characters either explains a lot or calls to question what events of the game are even real and all

all of these completely missable details beg the question why why spend such a gargantuan effort hiring actors recording lines professionally producing these songs and films and Easter eggs that most players will completely Miss why go to such depths to flesh out the subtext and the answer I think lies in this poster you find in the diner of awake one when I was looking back at the footage I had captured it rattled my mind that over 10 years ago even a minor detail like this was included the for

esight to know that in Wake 2 this coffee World area was going to be a big chapter of the game right down to the creepy Coffee Guy face then I was sobered by the fact that this was the remaster version so I went to go find footage from the original in 2010 and sure enough no poster this as well as a few other things were patched in to tease the sequel initially I was disappointed by this but then I realized that this is a perfect example of what sets remedy apart Sam lake has gone on record effe

ctively saying that back when Quantum brick was being produced that Alan Wake 2 probably wasn't happening remedy posted this update video sometime before this explaining that effectively Allan Wake wasn't bringing in the revenue they were counting on so they had to move on to something new but despite this Sam says that half the fun of actually getting to wake two all this time later is going back and making the details fit yeah it would be fun to say that that all of this is figured out perfect

ly years in advance but I also think that there is a lot of fun to be had in this work looking back and finding interesting ways to connect it and to me it's that willingness to paint a world that feels so incredibly congruent right down to the tiniest details that gives it this enigmatic aura this is a stack of scripts that were drafted before the final Allen wake 2 story was finished this might have been patched in later but this wasn't it was there in 2016 these games don't explain everything

which might be irritating to some but by using the level of detail and deep foreshadowing that they do remedy has earned the right to be cryptic and allow all of us to speculate because history shows they deliver and this is tough to pull off because because there are some games we've all played where the writers left things to interpretation or didn't explain everything about the world but it just doesn't work maybe it feels like they wrote themselves into a corner just didn't explain certain

things due to a lack of production time and it takes you out of the story but somehow not having proper answers for how this world Works feels correct it feels like you shouldn't these stories are so rigorously fleshed out and written that you don't get the sense that the writing fell short but more so that the forces at play here are truly just too much for one person to grasp like the longer you stare at them the less you really know like they're forever just Out Of Reach this quote from Sam r

egarding control I think says it best we were taking the genre of new weird this literary genre which takes this approach that we're dealing with things we don't understand fully it can't be explained satisf factually and handed to you like here's the answer and this is what it's all about balancing that you still have a very strong idea yourself that it's about these things but then having that constraint of never spelling things out walking that tight rope so everybody has enough to piece toge

ther and form a theory but not so much that we take away the opportunity to do that and just hand the explanation to you I find my interest sparked when something is wellmade and it feels to me like I'm not quite smart enough to understand everything he admits that this style of writing is not for everyone which I think we can all agree with but to me as outlandish as the events of these stories are they're strangely reminiscent of reality you will simply never have answers for everything in you

r life in the world the people around you you know it's all real you know it's impossible to know everything but not knowing something doesn't make it any less true or frightening and to me that's what is portrayed in these games a bizarre warped reflection of our existance that illustrates how complex it can be at its lowest and highest moments life isn't a lake you can't see it all from a Hilltop you can't reach the bottom it's an [Music] [Applause] [Music] ocean hey there you thanks so much f

or watching today I'm happy to finally get this video out because ever since I played control back in 2020 I knew I had to write about it at some point but it just never found its way onto my desk after filling in the blanks with wake 1 and two I just had to go for it I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoyed making it if you like what I do here and want to support the show consider joining my patreon for a dollar a month you can get all kinds of bonus content like editing live streams

updates creative input bloopers and even your name in the credits like you see here you might even be mentioned as a featured Patron like these lovely folks kaito Shannon blue Chris Tori Clint Walsh Kenan Ward retronx Dar Marshall and the great Swedish Fish let me know if you've played any of these games down below be sure to leave a like share subscribe and as always please have yourself a damn good one